Polish or Shine Your Boots

In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to polish or shine your boots. While you can use any type of boot, we will be using a pair of black mock combat boots with laces. You can use brown boots, slip-on boots, high boots, hiking boots, dress boots, or any other type of boots that require polishing. When polished, boots will hold a shine and look good. It sets a more impressive tone for you and those around you; so make sure to keep your boots cleaned and shined to make the best impression when meeting people or just walking around town.

Items You Will Need

A clean work space. To begin the first thing we will need to do is find a clean space in which to polish our boots.

Dirty boots. Or at least boots that need to be shined.

Something to place our boots on. It is best to use paper towels or newspaper to place your boots or boots on when polishing. In the example below you will see that one boot has been placed on a paper towel.

Something to apply and wipe off our shoe polish with.

We will need a medium firmness brush that is suitable for shining. If your boots are particularly dirty, then you may wish to scrub the boots with a stiff or hard brush before trying to polish them.

We will need one or two shoe or boot polishes. We will use both of these in polishing our boot. The first one we will apply is the waterproofing polish. Following that, we will use regular polish and then finally our brush.

Shine your Boots

Before we begin, we should remove the laces from our boot. This is done to allow us to polish the entire boot rather than just part of it. Additionally when we have finished, we will take one of the paper towels apply a small bit of shoe polish and wipe it lightly over the laces. This will also clean the laces a bit, and make them look better.

As you can see we have applied a liberal amount of polish to our boot. This is noticeable by the ridges. We will apply polish to the entire boot. Note that we will also apply polish to the sides of the soles of our boot. This is done so that we may also shine the sides of the soles rather than leaving them dirty, which will detract from the look of our boot.

Once you wiped the boot, you should see that it begins to shine a bit more

.

Also note that you will only have a small bit of black polish on your cloth, as the majority should have dried on the boot. In the event you have a large or excessive amount of polish, you are polishing incorrectly. This may be because you're using too much polish. It could also be because you did not wait long enough for the polish on the boot to dry.

Keep in mind, however, that it will be wet. Wet boots need to dry before you wipe the polish off with the buffing brush. In the photo below you will see a boot that is shiny. However, it is still wet. You can see that it is still wet due to the polish found in the seam of the boot and in the seams and creases of the boot leather.

Remember to wipe them with a bit of polish first so they look good. If you need help lacing up your boot, we have a series of articles on how to tie your shoe. For example, how to tie a shoelace in different ways.

Tips and Suggestions

There is a method of boot shining called spit shining. You can use this to get an even greater shine -- but it works best on smooth boots and dress shoes, rather than the more rough leather of the boot used in this tutorial.

Regular waterproofing and polishing will help condition the leather of your boots, and can help them to last years. It will also keep the leather from cracking.